PACE YOUR PLOT
Word. Every word matters. Each word impacts readers, so select each with care for craft and sound.
Concept. Is your concept strong enough and how will you better position your work?
Voice and Worldview. How fresh is your approach, style, tone, diction, syntax, mood, and pauses? How can you project your best self—and interiority?
Point of View—or who is telling the story, who is narrating it—create options that will make a huge difference. Memorable choices have included death itself, so how do you decide?
Setting & Place adds structure to story. Use it first, consider creating that unique, fresh place readers step into and stay.
Original Characters. & Characters. Explored all your characters: main, secondary, unspoken, and make them memorable.
Dialogue reveals character, draws readers in, defines characters, voice, and considers the negative side of good writing, what something is not.
Details serve double duty and point to what a reader must not miss and help to build out your story in extraordinary ways.
Descriptions invite your reader in to your story house, your world, your people (tone, mood, attitude) to really hear what you have to share and say.
Firsts. Test first breath of story: first lines, first sentence, first page, first chapter, and first page turns and chapter breaks in your story.
Immediacy and Engagement. Are you showing, performing, and engaging your stage fully?
Story Scenes, Summaries, & Structures. What are the various structures and how will you move, stop, pause, and halt your story?
Tension/Suspense/Surprise. Three key ways that keep your readers on the page.
Flashback, Flash-Forward, Cliffhanger. Dare to flashback, flash-forward, and cliffhangers to hop, skip, and jump your plot pacing.
Page Turns and Chapter Breaks surprise, reveal, present, and really play and engage readers—and strive for that ah-ha! and wow factor.
ACTION PLOT
Plot marks the moment-by-moment path your story moves to transport your readers to a unique time, place and experience. Pacing marks the muscle you flex to elevate your plot while weaving in more emotional pull: tension, suspense, surprise, to name a few. Even the fairly plot-impaired will see that pacing key moments within scenes will elevate your writing and heighten reader engagement.
Great pacing propels your plot forward and focuses your writing. It creates these wonderful pockets of informative ways to alert your reader to what’s important, perhaps imperative to the story. Plot transports readers into an experience that unfolds in a way that makes your
writing disappear. It keeps your readers turning the page until the very end (and stay, somehow changed, long after the cover closes).
EXPOSITION
Craft your first line and make it memorable. Present your exposition with care, so that your novel or mystery or thriller engages from moment one as the first exhilarating breath of story. Open Murder Among Friends, How Leopold and Lobe Tried to Commit the Perfect Crime by Candace Fleming and read: "Nineteen year-old Nathan Leopold would kill a child today." Now that's a memorable first line. It bares its teeth into the soul of the reader.
HOOK
Hook your reader from page one. Invite them in. Entice them to pay attention to the power of your first line. Think Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White: “Where is Papa going with that ax?” Or The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas: “I should not have come to this party.” Get the reader’s attention. Shake things up.
REVIEW PLOT SET UP
Read story beginnings. Hundreds of them. The best ones.
Read hundreds of books in your category. Especially the award-
winners. This, too, is part of the writer’s job.
Dissect the award-winning titles. What makes them work? Read hundreds of books and what will improve your writing.
Look at the extreme action in brilliant stories. Focus on active, visual writing that carries emotional depth. That is the goal of plot pacing. You’ve studied writing, so now put it to practice. Make a difference.
Take one glance at Crossover by Kwame Alexander and how movement meet literary energy:
“Dribbling
At the top of the key,
I’m MOVING & GROOVING,
POPping and ROCKING—Why you BUMPING?
Why you LOCKING?”
Aren’t you, as the reader, on the court with him, making moves and shimmying your way into his story? I would think so. Instantly.
Alexander entices and excites you with his energy, right? How does your own narrative stand up to this? This is your competition, so challenge yourself to see more and more nuances of techniques used by authors in every book you read and every sentence you write.
CONFLICT: INCITING INCIDENT
Give way to the conflict with your inciting incident. Bring tension, suspense, even surprise to your readers with monumental momentum. Move the story. Charge forward while broadcasting or hinting to why each moment matters. Decide what needs to be foreshadowed, shared, or highlighted to help your reader care and step inside your words, your page, and your mind. Thrill yourself to thrill them. Present action and unfold the over arcing story problem right away so readers connect to character, plot, and setting all in one fell swoop. Readers want to feel connected and be transported into your world. Yes, this is the hallmark of all the award-winners. It’s ideal among many options.
You can use music as a mood catalyst to draw the reader in, contrasting the shock-factor to come as what you share visually distorts
and bends into a larger, ever-looming reality like the one captured and experienced as a boy soldier in Never Fall Down by Patricia McCormick:
At night in our town, it’s music everywhere. Rich house. Poor house. Doesn’t matter. Everyone has music. Radio. Record player. Eight-track cassette. Even the guys who pedal the rickshaw cycle, they tie a tiny radio to the handlebar and sing for the passenger. In my town, music is like air, always there.
FORWARD TO FLASHBACK
You can move from present-to-past, move forward and flash back, from chapter to chapter with the same character like you might experience reading Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen. Her narrative shares one character who tells his story about joining a circus, moving from his nursing-home nineties all the way back to his youthful twenties reality: His parents are killed instantly in a car accident as he takes his finals to become a veterinarian. Devastated, he leaves exams unfinished and jumps on the circus train.
POV to POV
You can move from point of view to point of view around a single incident until the whole narrative unfolds, as seen in the award-winning novel Into the Water by Paula Hawkins. What a thrill ride it is! Many viewpoints are shared by chapters, some marked as flashbacks by their date, and each voice is characterized by different styles, diction, or prosody, so you know which character is speaking even if you didn’t
see the name as the chapter title. Brilliant in execution, the story is told in varied first person accounts to serve up a more intimate read. One character even speaks to a ghost—her dead sister—in second person and it works to provide flashback and interiority all at once. It’s these small decisions that matter in a big way.
In academic circles, many students study Yo! by Julia Alvarez, which is used in many diversity-focused literature courses. What makes
this story interesting is that you only learn about the main character through other characters. So it withholds characterization—in just the right way and keeps the reader engaged. The reader learns only so much and must read beneath the text to join the story and “puzzle out” the mystery presented in the forward flow of the story.
PACE YOUR PLOT
Get on the Page & Engage Readers
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PLOT OUT YOUR SCENES
How are you moving from Scene 1 to Scene 2 to Scene 3 and so on.
Just like dummying, this will allow you to see which scenes hail in importance. You will want to slow those and draw them out even more. You have so many tools to create such dynamic pacing with, so now it your time. Go back through your story and really amp up the pacing. So, now take the other side of this list and marker the emotional changes in each scene. Mark those scenes that are more emotionally charged and read it through, even using your Word.doc document read aloud mode. See how you can change up and slow the pacing where emotions run high.
FAR ENOUGH
Make sure you share dialogue and interiority throughout. Go far enough to create excite-ment during key moments in your story. Really let yourself roar out a great story and dare your daring; really push the poetic devices and whisper in some soft sounds during quite times, loud and hard sounds during charged times, and integrate your threes and repetition on top of threes, cast over a series of questions. For you see, not one of these tools and techniques mentioned in this guide should be used alone.
THEME, STRUCTURE, PLOT
Think about rhythm and breaths. Are sentences too long? Can you harness the power of the short sentence? What is the theme of your project and what can you do to rhythmically enhance the theme using three, or beats. Perhaps you might have one word pulsed in or echo throughout a scene to punch things up for your reader.
Try to hear more.
Try to write more, do more.
MIMIC SCENE’S ACTION
Not enough can be said about mimicking the action of a scene
with the way you craft your sentences and lines of story. If a strong wind is blowing, trees scratching on a windowsill, the lines of text might mock that movement. If characters are walking along the shore, listen. Experience the ebb and flow of the ocean, and place words into sentences with this same motion: cut in, shorten, elongate sentences, and mock the movement. Follow your character’s movement until his
eye follows water out onto the horizon. This action will be an additional layer to your story,. It may evoke visual imagery, too.
The next time you open a scene think about what it needs to lift off the page and come to life for your reader: running fast, use polysyndenton, fragments, and think about the foot-falls against
whatever ground your character is running on. Mimic this timing and sounds and sync it up with your words. You will surprise yourself and your reader.s What smells, visuals, objects in the scene support your story and further the experience?
Use this. What are the movements within the scene: quick jerks or longer strides? All of these things can be sued to improve your pacing.
In STIFF: The Curious Lives of Human Cadavers by Mary Roach, she shares and opens scenes. She’s visual, effective, in her comparisons: human heads like chickens, shaved, propped up for a surgery class, forty-some shaved scalps in aluminum roasting pans, propped up to catch the drippings. It’s all good writing that comes to life from the similes and metaphors used and the layout of the text and how it mocks the mind’s timeline in observing such shocking material:
Dr. Posselt begins just above H’s pubic hair and proceeds a good two feet north, to the base of her neck. He’s unzipping her like a parka.
Her sternum is sawed lengthwise so that her rib cage can be parted, and a large retractor is installed to pull the two sides of the incision apart so that it is now as wide as it is long. To see her this way, held open like a Gladstone bag, forces a view of the human torso for what it basically is: a large, sturdy container for guts.
HOP, SKIP & JUMP STORY
Be bold. Be brave. Be daring. Trust your reader to follow your beats, thoughts and ideas and summarize where you must to hop, skip, and jump your story forward. If time passes, find a structure to support
this move and use less words to move or transport your story to the next section of action to help the pacing. Focus on quick movements
between important scenes. Slow your scenes enough to show or report to your reader each moment’s importance to your plot and emotional arc. This works for those times when you are moving a character from one place and location to another. How will your character exit one scene and enter the next?
SCENE CUTS & CLIFFHANGERS
One of the most important moment in your story is the chapter end.
The shifting of a scene. And you can create that moment that lingers and hints to what comes next. Use the scene cut and cliffhanger. Some writers are simply brilliant at endings and cuts, shifts from scene to scene, chapter to chapter, whether they are in the beginning or ‘muddy’ middle or that very anticipated dismount at the end. Nailing your scene cuts and cliffhangers host high rewards.
Make interesting shifts from scene to scene by connecting with a similar moment at the close of one scene and the opening of another. Fall into picture book language. Drop hints for what’s at stake as you move into the next scene. The Award-winning novel The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen comes to mind. Reader enters story in a hospital bed. The main character just run her best race, broke a track record and ran her personal best, only to have her school bus hit by a drunk driver and now faces a new reality:
Dr. Wells flashes a final smile at me. “Focus on the positive, Jessica. We’ll have you up and walking again in short order.”
This from the man who sawed off my leg.
He whooshes from the room, leaving a dark, heavy cloud of the unspoken behind.
My mother smiles and coos reassuringly, but she knows what I’m thinking. What does it matter! I’ll never run again.”
And sometimes, it’s a simple repetition of a question: “Why me? WHY ME?”
Nonetheless, what you can do to suspend your reader’s curiosity and give a simple hint to what will be addressed in the next scene or chapter, you will go a long way to improve the pacing of your plot.
RAPID-FIRE SUCCESSSION
When you wish for that quick repetition that serves up a swift-moving feel, turn to fragments, short sentences, asyndeton and polysyndeton, and really infuse your writing with the many literary and poetic devices in order to really take full advantage of both the speed of a short sentence (and how it refreshes your reader’s palate) and the benefits of prosody.
Whew! That’s a whole lot of good stuff to do to any novel or book project. Can you image what you will discover as we move to the next tools with all the nuances they provide?
Brace yourself. Surprise yourself.
— WORKSHOP IT! —
Read Aloud. Listen. Monitor.
Take some of your writing and read it aloud. Have your Word program read it aloud. This is a simple thing to add and it’s a great way to take that step back and really hear and listen to your words and their rhythm.
Where do you pause? What words to you punctuate? How are your words pinging your reader’s ear? All these things are important. So, don’t miss this step. It’s the best thing you can do for your writing. Then read your writing aloud. Plus, in the newer Word programs, you can actual program a voice to read your written words, and it’s fun.
PLOT FLIPS
A whole story might play out in reverse as seen in Genuine Fraud by E. Lockart. The end is the beginning and the story presents backwards, which creates a unique experience for readers.
Good writing is good writing is good writing, to parody Gertrude Stein, but what you can do to gamify your work, build interactivity in the text, in the art, in the form and format, and what you can add on, will matter a great deal in today’s market moving forward.
METAFICTION
You now see so many books that manipulate form into story, discuss and direct characters to interactively engage the pages of the physical book in the storytelling and more. So really challenge and think of these mash-ups as well. There are books that put the reader in control of the flow or unfolding of story that mocks coding: “If this, then…” Don’t stay in your own spot. Don’t just stand there. Play! I encourage you to explore and move out of your comfort zone to really engage yourself to engage your readers. Be sure to push the boundaries and thrill readers.
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PLOT LIST
In Crenshaw by Newbery Medalist Katherine Applegate, Applegate uses a list to open her story and introduce main character, supporting character and story problem at a swift pace:
I noticed several weird things about the surfboarding cat. Thing number one: He was a surfboarding cat.
Thing number two: He was wearing a T-shirt. It said CATS RULES, DOGS DROOL.
Thing number three: He was holding a closed umbrella, like he was worried about getting wet. Which, when you think about it, is kind of not the point of surfing.
Thing number four: No one else on the beach seemed to see him.
He’d grabbed a good wave, and his ride was smooth. But as the cat neared shore, he made the mistake of opening his umbrella.
A gust of wind yanked him into the sky. He missed a seagull by seconds.
Even the gull didn’t seem to notice him.
You, as a reader, confront the issue in the novel: not just that the main character has a cat problem, but that the main character has an imaginary cat problem. This is a list that present the issue and then that
list also flips to interior characterization:
I squeezed my eyes shut and counted to ten. Slowly.
Ten seconds seemed like the right amount of time for me to stop being crazy….
I close my eyes again. I counted to ten. I opened my eyes, and the umbrella—or the bumbershoot, or whatever it was—had vanished. Just like the cat.
The author shares how the main character feels about his situation. And this leads the reader to some serious friction in the story when the author begins the next chapter with:
Here’s the thing: I am not an imaginary friend kind of guy.
A list is one tool with so many uses. A list can be ordinary and move to extraordinary, depending on where your imagination takes you.
By exploring lists fully, you open your story up to the many ways a list might enhance your manuscript.
— WORKSHOP IT! —